It's a particular price representation. It comes with some nice properties (actually way too many to list here), but in short:

- each candle bar holds 3+ values representing a trading session (day or whatever), usually OHLC data. OHLC data means, each candle bar tells the Opening price, High for the day, Low for the day and Closing price.

- the relations between the graphical element that is generated with those 4 values tells the market sentiment for that day. That in turn hints at what may come next.

- candle bars are fractally auto-similar. That is, a monthly bar holds 4 weekly bars which in turn hold 5 to 7 daily bars (depends on the days the market is closed). Appropriately looking at multiple time frames hints at what price may do next.

I know this is way too little to explain you why those things are good - much better than EvE price charts - but I seriously risk a total TLDR here, because describing a candle bar is like describing a woman. You could go on for months without scratching the surface!

I'd like to ask Mynna about it. How does his own markets analysis methodology explain that?

In my method, you can see buyers and sellers are fiercely battling over Big Round Number 800 ISK. They formed a tight range market I marked with a yellow rectangle. Whoever will win the 800 price level level fight will drag price outside that zone (look at it as it was a gigantic tug of war, where price is the ribbon tied to the rope, buyers and sellers are trying to pull the rope till price leaves a rectangle drawn on the floor. That rectangle is the yellow one I have drawn.

- Scenario 1: buyers win and drag price outside of the yellow rectangle (it's the same rectangle I have also drawn on the weekly chart). If so, the next target is the upper red trend line. By the time price gets there, the trend line will cross 1000 ISK BRN and we'll have a so called confluence. Confluences are powerful situations where multiple factors align up, boosting their effects each other. If buyers win and price gets to 1000, that level will be a good place to either push price sky high or to powerfully repel it down. Above the rectangle it's advisable to buy, as long as price puts a bullish price action pattern on top of it, Please read my EvE-RL finance thread to learn a lot more about these concepts.

- Scenario 2: sellers win and drag price below the yellow rectangle. It's a DANGEROUS area, because price will be stuck between the rectangle bottom (aka RM "support") and the lower red trend line. This will cause a battle where you SHALL risk losing ISK if you'll buy in there.

- Scenario 3: sellers win and drag price back to the lower trend line. If and only if price will put a bullish price action pattern then you may buy and have a decent hope it'll go back up again. Just take attention when it goes back to the yellow rectangle because meeting its bottom will create a resistance effect that will try push price back down. So you have to employ money management in there. More about money management is in my finance thread.

If sellers drag price below the lower trend line and put a bearish price action pattern, then it's going to be a painful day. The day of panic dumping. That trend line is way too strong to not cause mayhem when broken.

Usque Ad Mortem

"Isotopes stopped being a trade at 680 and begun being a gamble from that level upwards." VV circa 2012 Market Forums.

I didn't get in on the ground floor here, but making some nice profits hauling. Buy low/Sell high in other regions. Still have a feeling it will inch upwards towards the mythical 1000. If anything, its fun to watch and see who wins this war of rectangles.

"Isotopes stopped being a trade at 680 and begun being a gamble from that level upwards." VV circa 2012 Market Forums.

I didn't get in on the ground floor here, but making some nice profits hauling. Buy low/Sell high in other regions. Still have a feeling it will inch upwards towards the mythical 1000. If anything, its fun to watch and see who wins this war of rectangles.

True that, but markets evolve and we have to evolve with them.

Markets are made by men, markets are men.

Once a market breaks a new horizon, it is already raising the bar to a new, bold target!

Said in more technical words, swings mark the price breathing room, if it manages to create an higher swing, that swing SHALL be forever recorded and will be visited later again.

Smugglers Inc.

Why do you think that this kind of analysis is applicable in a world where a patch can change everything.

It seems to me that anything that you get from such charts cannot be predictive in the world of eve. I understand that people use them IRL, and I am skeptical about them IRL also, however, I accept that IRL there may be someone really smart who can predict the unpredictable and the charts can be leading indicators of future price.

In Eve markets you have huge jumps not before but after the news release. If patches were predictable or patch info was leaked before general release you would not see such huge jumps once patch notes were released. The jumps are not even necessarily indicative of change in value of anything because of existence of free stockpiles of everything. To me it seems that people are selling the news hence the initial spike, then stockpiles get depleted and the new true value gets discovered some time afterwards. How long it takes depends on the size of stockpiles and on demand. Maybe if it cost money to store stockpiles just like IRL then things would be different.

Why do you think that charts have predictive value in eve?

Would not it be profitable to figure out in which market you operate and then set you up with a chart knowing fully well how you are going to interpret it? How do you know that you are not being set up?

Why do you think that this kind of analysis is applicable in a world where a patch can change everything.

Because it's made to be applicable in a RL world where a central bank statement, a speculation, a political decision can change everything in far more devastating ways than an EvE patch does.

Actually, patches come every 6 months, deep markets changing RL events happen once a month if not more often.

Rthor wrote:

It seems to me that anything that you get from such charts cannot be predictive in the world of eve. I understand that people use them IRL, and I am skeptical about them IRL also, however, I accept that IRL there may be someone really smart who can predict the unpredictable and the charts can be leading indicators of future price.

They are not predictive at all. That's why they work. Nobody knows the future.Charts are not leading indicators either. They are snapshots. The method applied to analyze them, instead, is called "trend following". Following as in "delayed". Which is totally the opposite of "predicting the future" or "leading indicator".

Rthor wrote:

In Eve markets you have huge jumps not before but after the news release.

This depends on whether there are news leaks or not. Same as goes in RL.

Rthor wrote:

To me it seems that people are selling the news hence the initial spike, then stockpiles get depleted and the new true value gets discovered some time afterwards. How long it takes depends on the size of stockpiles and on demand. Maybe if it cost money to store stockpiles just like IRL then things would be different.

In RL we assist to the same behaviors and this despite storing stockpiles has a cost. Quick examples: moltitude of oil tankers full and parked around during oil speculations: they are highly paid but still... they are there.